The study of the structure of research articles has developed into a significant field of research. The original research focus on texts produced by English academics has been expanded over the years to allow for the investigation of the structure of texts written by academics publishing in various other languages. The ongoing discussion between the members of the international discourse community has not yet addressed the question whether the tool most frequently used in such studies, i.e., Swales' "Create a Research Space" (CARS) model, is sensitive enough to capture all the characteristic features of theoretical research paper introductions. The main purpose of this paper is: (1) to examine whether the CARS model accurately describes the introductions of English theoretical research articles published in linguistics journals of international currency; and (2) to compare the rhetorical patterns of English and Hungarian theoretical research paper introductions. The paper is organized into five sections. Section 1 provides an introduction. Section 2 discusses the theoretical background of the study with an overview of Swales' CARS Model and a review of related research investigations. Section 3 addresses methodological issues concerning the compilation of the two corpora used in the study and describes their key features. It also discusses the applicability of the CARS model for the analysis of Hungarian introductions and introduces the modifications of the CARS model necessary for the accurate analysis of theoretical research paper introductions, and describes the procedure of the analysis. Section 4 presents a contrastive analysis of the move structure of English and Hungarian research articles and reports on the figures of the analysis of each move and step. Section 5 presents the authors' conclusions following analysis of the CARS Model. (Contains 6 tables.)